Hope to Find
by celinae
Summary: What images return? The story of Beatrix Kiddo and the beginning.
1. Foretold the rest

**Disclaimer:** All creative rights to the Kill Bill characters belong to Quentin Taratino; I am not getting any profit from this story.

**A/N:** I see this having maybe five parts (though each is self-contained).

* * *

Inside the Pussy Wagon, she stares for a moment at that perfect suburban house, with its toys strewn across the pristine lawn, its aura of normalcy and banality. There is a girl in there who will grow up to kill her, she knows. It has happened time and time again, even to herself, and she does not doubt that she will die at the hands of that grown-up child. To pretend otherwise is to deny the truth of her nature.

Over the course of her life she has wondered whether things might have been different if she had not lost her mother to violence. Would she have found Bill? Would she have been content living an abject, normal life, as she was unable to be now? Would she have been able to kill people?

Now, she wonders if, given the chance to change the past, she would do so.

* * *


	2. I'll be waiting

**Disclaimer:** All creative rights to the Kill Bill characters belong to Quentin Taratino; I am not getting any profit from this story.

* * *

The event that created Beatrix Kiddo happened like this:

She was coming home from kindergarten, her new pink backpack bouncing on her back. Her lunchbox swung in her hand, the remnants of her meal shifting inside with each wide swing up and down. When she got home she planned on eating a snack and watching the TV, and she thought for a moment what show she wanted to watch most.

Beatrix walked through the front door of her house just in time to watch her mother's decapitated head fall to the floor. There was suddenly blood everywhere; she had enough scrapes to recognize the red liquid spraying out of her mother's body, but she couldn't comprehend it. She stared at the unrecognizable, grayish face and blood-stained torso crumpled on the ground. Where was her mother in this mess?

The blond woman took her sword and wiped it with a cocktail napkin she grabbed off of the coffee table nearby. She seemed aware that Beatrix was standing there, mute and motionless, but she didn't acknowledge her.

Inch by inch the gleaming steel became pure again.

Finally she sheathed the sword and seemed to see Beatrix; her flinty eyes scanned her critically. But something in her stiff face relented, and she turned away with an ironic, bitter smile.

"I can't pretend to be sorry for your loss. But when you grow up and it still hurts--

"I'll be waiting."

And with those words the woman stalked past her and into the bright afternoon.

* * *


	3. No name but the one

**Disclaimer:** All creative rights to the Kill Bill characters belong to Quentin Tarantino; I am not getting any profit from this story.

* * *

She ends up being taken in by a middle-aged couple a two-hour drive away from the home where her mother's head was decapitated. The first thing she's aware of, after her stuff and her are transported to the clean, unfamiliar house, is that they forgot to take her pink backpack. But the woman—her new mother, she tells her—buys her a new backpack, one that isn't sparkly or pink or has sequins. It's a pale blue and new-mom tells her it's the color of her eyes, but that doesn't make it her pink backpack. Just a replacement.

New-mom tells her to join the local soccer team, and she ends up being just as fast as all the players on the boys' team, just as quick at juggling the ball. Within five months she's the star of the team, the coach's favorite, but all she can think about is the fact that the only person cheering for her on the sidelines is not the woman who laid on that cold linoleum floor half a year ago.

Everyday after school she comes home. New-mom gives her a glass of juice and a baggy of animal crackers and then drives her to the soccer field where she practices for hours. She comes home and tries to do her homework as quickly as possible (copying the alphabet over and over, adding 1 and 2 and 3). New-mom likes to clean and cook fake-chicken for dinner and sometimes she holds Beatrix's hand a little too tightly when walking across the street.

Her new father, the first one she's ever had, doesn't seem to like her very much. He pats her golden, silky head and sometimes stares at her when she's sitting in front of the television watching cartoons. She wishes she could disappear when she notices him close to her, looming over her like a dark pot-bellied shadow.

Eleven months and fifteen days after her mother dies, she runs away from her second home with nothing but a lunchbox full of underwear and a single photo. She feels weightless and small and hopeless, a small raft sinking into a big sea. But Beatrix knows, even as young as she is, that sometimes you have to leave things behind in order to move on. Sometimes you can't wait for the bridges to burn before you cross them. In this case, she leaves her last name and a chance for a normal life behind before she is forced to watch them fall apart.


End file.
